LV.23 Ranker Lee Hyun-woo — [3]
4 Fantasy Online was an unfair game for the people of Earth.
The people of As could start from any region they pleased, but Earthlings had their starting zones locked according to nationality. Koreans could only begin in Korean territory; Japanese, only in Japanese territory.
The Korean and Japanese starting zones sat adjacent to each other, and in the game's early days, clashes between players of the two nations were a regular occurrence. The Baekdu Guild had led the fighting against the Japanese, and by uploading the results of those Korea-Japan battles online, they had earned themselves considerable fame.
Quite some time had passed since then. Most of the Japanese players had long since quit 4 Fantasy Online. Even so, the Baekdu Guild still billed itself as an anti-Japanese guild.
In the meantime, the guild had occupied most of the territory that had once belonged to Japanese players. The front line where Ban Ji-sung was currently running amok lay within their borders as well. Anyone who wanted to take down Ban Ji-sung — who was busy thrashing the Japanese army — would need the Baekdu Guild's cooperation.
That was why they had gone with the Rankers to the Baekdu Guild's command and stated their business. The Guild Master's response was ice-cold.
Lee Hyun-woo was so incredulous he had to ask.
"A pro-Japanese collaborator?"
Baekdu Guild Master Kang Joo-seok crossed his arms and snapped back.
"That's exactly what you are. You're trying to do those Jap bastards a favor, aren't you?"
"How is taking down Ban Ji-sung doing the Japs any favors?"
"You're going to get rid of a Swordmaster who's busy pounding the Japanese army into the dirt — and then what? You want to sit there and watch the Jap bastards take over this game?"
"Japanese accounts have to pay four times the account fee. How exactly are the Japs supposed to take over the game?"
To be precise, it was four times the fee for choosing the Earth faction and eight times for choosing the As faction — terms uniquely punitive for Japan and the other nations that had fought in the Second World War.
"The Jap bastards have money. They can afford those fees, no problem! Their population's three times ours, and they've got the same conscription system we do, so they've all got military experience — they're a filthy threat. If Ban Ji-sung hyungnim hadn't been around, every last scrap of Korean territory would be under Jap occupation by now."
"That's—"
"You know why all those Jap bastards quit this game? It's not because the account fees are expensive. It's because a Swordmaster keeps showing up out of nowhere and slaughtering every last one of them! And you want to go out of your way to get rid of that Swordmaster?"
"Whether the Japs play or not is beside the point. A serial killer is walking around playing independence fighter. The right thing to do is take him out, and fast."
The moment Lee Hyun-woo raised the matter of morality, Kang Joo-seok met him with morality of his own.
"Listen to this guy making excuses. This son of a bitch really is a collaborator, isn't he? You get rid of Ban Ji-sung, and Japanese logins go right back up. You want to help the Japanese take over the game and win? What, you trying to help turn that Tenno bastard into a knife-ear, huh?"
Lee Hyun-woo and the other Rankers had fallen silent when Gaon opened his mouth.
"Did you just say knife-ear?"
"What? And what are you gonna—"
"What is wrong with you racist pieces of shit? Whoa. My mind just went completely blank."
He had been through something similar not long ago. Jijonmussang caught on and piled on.
"Come on, how do you insult an elf to his face by calling him a knife-ear? That's like walking up to a Black person and calling them a nigger."
"An elf?"
Kang Joo-seok's eyes went wide. A Baekdu Guild member standing beside him had recognized Gaon.
"Ah — that's the guy from As. From the video."
Kang Joo-seok frowned.
"Is 'knife-ear' really that harsh? I'm just talking about the pointy ears—"
He tried to play it off as nothing. It did not work. Gaon roared.
As the master of a guild that billed itself as anti-Japanese, Kang Joo-seok had no defense against a story like that.
"I apologize. I didn't know you were an elf."
"So you just throw that word around freely in front of anyone who isn't an elf? Are you out of your mind?"
"I'm truly sorry."
"If you're truly sorry, how about you cooperate without a fuss?"
Gaon tried to slide his real objective in on the back of the apology. It did not work.
"I am truly sorry. But that, I cannot do."
Even with a face full of genuine remorse, Kang Joo-seok declared that he would never, under any circumstances, cooperate in taking down Ban Ji-sung.
In the end, Gaon and the rest of them had to walk out of the guild command with nothing to show for it. Gaon grumbled.
"Shit. I even played the race card and threw in a lie, and it still didn't work."
Lee Hyun-woo, privately wondering whether this man was actually an elf at all, said,
"It wasn't a complete waste, though. At least they haven't told us to get the hell out."
"So they didn't throw us out — and that does what, exactly? The way those guys are digging in, we're not catching Ji-sung. Your employer sent you here to take down a Swordmaster, didn't they?"
"I'll contact the employer. At this rate it doesn't look like the job's happening. Whether we pull out or not..."
Skill was skill, but there was no way this handful of people was going to punch through a guild the size of a division and get the job done. This was a Swordmaster hunt. The Korean people all knew that even the full combined weight of the military and the police had failed to accomplish that goal. Was it not one of the greatest tragedies in the history of the Korean people?
A short while later, one of the Rankers came back from contacting their employer, wearing a bewildered look.
"They said to wait a bit. Stand by."
"Think they're going to negotiate with the Baekdu Guild for us?"
Whatever the plan was, there was nothing to do in the meantime. They all gathered and started shooting the breeze, and Lee Bok-dong watched with an envious look as Gaon took over the conversation.
"Shooting a Swordmaster in the back works just fine. More than fine. However fast they are, they still can't spin around and swing a sword faster than a bullet flies."
"But you dodged them, Mr. Gaon. Even sniper fire."
"The situation itself was screaming danger. And the sniping — I had a Haste spell running and I could feel when the shot was coming, so I got out of the way. If someone was perfectly concealed and took a surprise shot? You don't dodge that. Not normally."
"Then... could we actually take a run at a Swordmaster? Even the Korean military and police couldn't do it. Neither could the US Army."
"The way I see it, it might be possible. You people are genuinely good. The sniper especially — the long-range shots, the way he relocates between firing points, it's on a completely ridiculous level. Pulling off sniping like that with World War II gear isn't normal, is it?"
"Ah, well. The equipment in this game somehow performs close to modern standards. The vehicles too..."
"Even so, it's really impressive. Special forces?"
"Not special forces. I just found a talent for it in-game. Anyway, Lord Gaon seemed to be toying with those highly skilled guys, didn't he?"
"I told you, I'm not a Swordmaster, and I'm not Lord Gaon either."
"If you're not a Swordmaster, then what..."
"I'm a Sword Expert. A Wood Elf Sword Expert."
"A Wood Elf? But the name..."
"Wood Elves revere Lord Gaon. He protected the boys with great devotion and leadership, didn't he? He kept them safe for two hundred years and brought most of them home — and most of those were Wood Elves. That achievement alone is enough to earn everyone's praise, so I borrowed his name in the game, at least, as a gesture of gratitude."
It was at that moment — just as the Goddess was admonishing him in her trembling, jade-bell voice that one must not flush one's face crimson merely because one's goddess was the Goddess of Fire — that a man appeared. He was a member of the Baekdu Guild, and his expression was grim.
"Please leave. Immediately."
"We're not going anywhere until we get an official apology!"
Gaon shouted, but the guild member kept his head bowed and his tone firm.
"A proper apology will come later, they said. Regardless, you cannot stay here right now."
"Why not?"
"NPC enemies have appeared out of nowhere. This whole area is about to turn into a battlefield. If you're not careful, you'll get swept up in it."
"NPC enemies?"
"Kashad loaded four undead divisions onto a fleet and sortied. Word is this is the destination. I mean, honestly, I don't even know what to say... Anyway, you understand you need to leave, right? Hurry."
It was not just talk. The Baekdu Guild members who had been loafing around moments before were now moving with frantic purpose. To the Rankers, most of whom had completed their military service, the scene was uncomfortably reminiscent of an emergency drill.
"What is this? Some kind of act to chase us off?"
Lee Hyun-woo answered Gaon's question.
"I don't think so."
"And you know that how?"
Lee Hyun-woo held up his radio.
"I just got word. That undead army they just mentioned... our employer hired them."
Even for Gaon, who could casually throw around tens of billions of won, this was astonishing.
"Four divisions?"
"Yes. They're going to throw them at the Baekdu people, and we're supposed to go after Ban Ji-sung in the chaos."
"No, look — I've hired skeletons myself, so I know. No matter how much money you've got, hiring that many shouldn't be possible. You'd be better off gathering players as mercenaries, even if money were rotting in piles..."
"That's what I thought too. But they actually hired them, so."
Everyone was skeptical, but the employer's message had not been idle talk. Several hours later they still had not left the area. They hid along a suitable stretch of mountainside and watched the situation develop, and so they were there to see the enemy approach.
"Whoa. That is..."
Ghost ships filled the horizon — galleys and steamships alike, racing toward them at speed, driven by the power of restless souls. A force of that size would more than make up four divisions.
This would certainly be enough to hold the Baekdu Guild's attention. Taking a run at Ban Ji-sung in the chaos was entirely possible.
Right. They're going after our Swordmaster. An employer with that kind of goal would have this kind of capability...
And if they succeeded? It would be a historic achievement, nothing less. Lee Hyun-woo felt a fresh thrill at the thought, then suddenly turned to Gaon.
"You said you were a Wood Elf, didn't you? That you revere Lord Gaon."
"Yeah."
"Were you perhaps in that other world together with Lord Gaon? You said it was a joke earlier, but... have you actually seen Ban Ji-sung?"
Gaon hastily straightened out his backstory.
"Hmm? Well, I've seen him, sure..."
"What kind of person was he?"
Every gaze in the group locked onto Gaon. Elves were rare in the world — rare on Earth, and rare even on the internet. Hearing about an actual historical figure from the mouth of an elf, a walking history book, was not an opportunity that came along often.
True to their expectations, Gaon began to speak.
"I called him a serial killer and all that earlier, but back then I couldn't have imagined he'd turn out that way. He was a genuinely decent guy."
"Decent?"
"Whenever he opened his mouth it was the same things. His father had been an independence fighter. He ought to follow that example, but instead he'd been conscripted by the Japanese and dragged all the way to As, and he was ashamed of it. The moment he got out, he was going to devote himself to the independence movement and live up to his father's name."
"I didn't know Ban Ji-sung's father was an independence activist."
"Not everything makes it into the history books, you know."
Everyone was listening closely. Even Lee Bok-dong, who could not find a way into the conversation, hung on every word. He felt it afresh — that this man was from As, and of another race besides. An elf, so like a human and yet utterly different. Standing right here with him, and yet inhabiting a completely different dimension...
And then, in a tone that was not the least bit elf-like, Gaon muttered under his breath.
"Anyway, that son of a bitch Ban Ji-sung already got his ass kicked by his hyung, I swear to god."
Ban Ji-sung claimed to be a patriot. He insisted that his murders, too, were acts of patriotism — the removal of filth polluting the sacred soil of Joseon.
The criteria for "filth" went something like this: heinous criminals who rode bicycles on the sidewalk. Territorial polluters who urinated in the street. Attempted murderers who smoked on the roadside. Pro-Japanese collaborators who used Japanese products. Race traitors who dyed their hair yellow in admiration of Western barbarians every bit as wicked as the Japs. Traitors to the nation who put up English shop signs. And last of all, those who had stood by and failed to punish the wicked deeds of that evil filth — that is, whichever passersby happened to be near the victims at the time.
Even after Ban Ji-sung had killed a few hundred of these "filth," the press had not been stingy with its praise. He had claimed from the start that he was killing pro-Japanese collaborators, and it was not a complete lie. In Ban Ji-sung's view, the filth listed above were every bit as bad as collaborators, and so they counted as collaborators.
The press that had been singing his praises finally closed its mouth when Ban Ji-sung, true to form, had killed his way into the thousands. The broadcast condemning him that came out at that point amounted to a single program. Even the network that had aired that one and only condemnation never managed to broadcast anything afterward. They were no longer in a position to.
Ban Ji-sung had gone to the network that had called him a murderer and protested, vehemently — by stacking a tower of journalists' severed heads in front of the building.
As time went on, the killing produced more and more innocent victims. Eventually Ban Ji-sung was no longer content to kill only the "filth" and nearby passersby. He would tail whatever filth had caught his eye, track down their friends and families, and slaughter them all — the friends on the grounds that birds of a feather were wicked by association, the families on the grounds that they carried wicked genes.
Of course, people interpreted this as Ban Ji-sung simply inventing whatever excuses he needed to kill more, now that suitable targets were no longer so easy to find. Once his patriotic activities had reached this stage, people were too frightened to walk the streets freely. Foreign tourists stopped coming entirely, and foreign businessmen would not go anywhere near the place. Every nightlife spot in Seoul had to close its doors, down to the pool halls and karaoke rooms.
A nationwide stagnation, accomplished by a single superhuman.
The Korean government threw everything it had into eliminating the Swordmaster who was no longer a national hero but a mass murderer. The police were mobilized, and the military with them. It was useless.
It was a well-known fact that a Swordmaster was a king of urban warfare and a god of guerrilla combat. In a country whose territory was mostly mountains and cities, catching a Swordmaster was very nearly impossible. Naturally the operations failed, one after another, and as Korean civilians and USFK personnel continued to be murdered, even the American military was brought in, furious. The dead scaled up in proportion to the troops committed.
When the combined total of "victims" and "killed in action" passed ten thousand, the United States proposed a nuclear strike. Given that Ban Ji-sung operated primarily in Seoul, this amounted to dropping a nuke on the middle of Seoul.
Barring the truly insane, nobody wants to watch a nuclear weapon fall on their own capital. Korea's terrified leaders went looking for another way to eliminate the superhuman.
They had to bring in another Swordmaster, somehow. There were none on Earth, which meant they would have to come from As. They would have to invite those superhumans to Seoul and ask them to fight.
Fortunately, Korean independence activists had been active in As as well, so the people of As did not look unkindly on Korea. Even so, it was a difficult request. Which Swordmaster, exactly, was going to risk their life in a fight like that?
The Swordmaster Gaon, Ban Ji-sung's close friend, had gone into seclusion for closed-door training, and there was no way to reach him. The Wood Elf Swordmasters, famous for their ties to the Korean independence activists, refused to come at all on the grounds that Seoul's air was intolerably filthy.
They had no choice but to contact an aging human Swordmaster — and, to their astonishment, that Swordmaster agreed to the request.
Hyungtun came to Seoul. One hour and twenty-four minutes later, Ban Ji-sung was defeated.